We are delighted to look forward to another busy year of cruising, with lecturing trips to Cape Verde in April; Spitsbergen and the North Cape in June; some unusual ports in Iceland in August; and to Barbados, Grenada, St Lucia and Antigua in the Caribbean in November.  Bookings are coming in for 2013 too: tho the Amazon in January 2013, around the south of South America in February 2013, and, our latest booking, an amazing cruise from Canada to Greenland and then home via Iceland in August 2013.

Details of all our cruise bookings are on a page that we've newly-added to the site here.

We have just returned from an amazing 32-day cruise, organised by Noble Caledonia on board the 5-star expedition ship Island Sky. It took us and 90-odd lucky passengers to places I certainly never thought we'd be able to visit.

We flew out to join the ship on the Cape Verde islands, with a day to explore Santa Antao.  A few days at sea took us to Ascension – a fascinating island, sadly changed hugely by human impacts but still with lots of interest.  The we sailed on for two days on St Helena, a beautiful island to which I'd love to return – preferably before the airport is built, because that will change it beyond recognition.

We were scheduled then to have 5 days on Tristan da Cunha, the remotest inhabited island in the world.  The weather truncated that slightly to 3 days, but we were able to land on Nightingale Island and see Northern Rockhopper Penguins, Fur Seals and breeding Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatrosses, and had two days to explore Tristan itself.  I had the huge privilege and pleausre of being Santa Claus to the Tristanian children, before joining our friends on the island for an amazing feast of stuffed mutton.

We then set off for South Georgia, but had to abort this because of unseasonally severe weather, and headed towards the Falklands instead (celebrating Hogmanay in style at sea, which was a first for me). We had an extra day on the Falklands, so as well as time in Stanley we were fortunate to visit Saunders, Carcass, New and West Point Islands, and see loads of Black-browed Albatrosses, Imperial Shags, and Magellanic, Gentoo, Southern Rockhopper and King Penguins, as well as a solitary Macaroni Penguin, bringing our species tally to 6.

It was an utterly memorable trip, which produced hundreds of photographs, some of which I will put onto www.above-and-below.com at some future date.

I am delighted that the Edinburgh publishing house, Birlinn, have now republished my Scottish Wild Flowers guide, which Harper-Collins had let go out of print.  I took the opportunity to fully updated the species names, families and order of presentation to the latest taxonomic thinking, while still retaining the habitat-based arrangement of species to make the book as useful as possible to non-botanists.  Birlinn have done a great job with printing, the colour I think is sharper and clearer than in earlier editions, but the book is also thinner and lighter, so even easier to slip into a rucksac.  Copies are available from Amazon (see right).

A "Mini Guide" version of the book is also now in press from Birlinn, and this is due this spring.  It covers most of the species in the 'main book' but is even easier to pocket and carry, so there is no excuse for not taking it with you wherever you travel around Scotland!